PC  Did you feel that was playing out within COUM and TG?

CFT  Yes, because you get the real-life experiences that created the phrase Throbbing Gristle, and other terms which fed into COUM.

PC  You don’t hear those in the dinner party circuit, do you?

CFT  You don’t, and you don’t hear those terms ascribed to who or where they came from. It’s like they just appeared from nowhere, but they didn’t.

You had to get down and dirty to even find those expressions.

PC  There was a certain art world condescension towards COUM. I get the picture of a scene full of supposedly Marxist art groups in the ’70s who were nonetheless dismissive because you were untrained artists.

CFT  I never expected any different. Gen embraced it, because he had dropped out, and had a credential because he’d gone to university and rejected it.

I didn’t even have that as my one rung up the ladder for credibility with the art world. It didn’t bother me. I was doing what I wanted to do.

To confess something you must deny something first, and I’ve never denied anything.

But within that, many artists realized that they didn’t have to adhere to what they’d been taught, even if they were middle or upper class. The Kipper Kids were amazing. They got down and brutal and I never see class in their works at all. Not everyone was so true to their purpose. There was whatever was up front, and at the back of their mind, was a little career flag waving all the time. I was quite good at sniffing out bullshit.

PC  The autobiographical references in COUM performances were quite oblique, but in the album Time to Tell and this book you seem to have moved steadily towards overt self-analysis or confession …

CFT  I think it’s self-realization rather than confession or analysis, because analysis implies that I’m trying to find something. It’s actually more that things get revealed, suddenly a light comes on, ‘yes, now I know why’. And to confess something you must deny something first, and I’ve never denied anything. That’s probably what got me into trouble, being too direct.

Gen was always was more interested in music. He started moving away from the art performances, but I was just beginning as an artist because

I was making work on my own with the sex magazines.

PC  Gen always maintained that TG wasn’t a political group. Did you deliberately try to avoid a clear ideology?

CFT  Because you take risks and you challenge, those ideas are shifting all the time. How can you define a group when you want to go beyond definitions? You’d be confining yourself too much. The only way that you’re going to move forward is to push past boundaries and false walls of expectation. Both TG and COUM had a very similar ethos: no rules, no boundaries, anything is material. Anything that hits our radar, we’d see what

we could do with it.

PC The album Jazz Funk Greats pushed back at your industrial image to something lighter. Did your reputation as transgressive feel just as limiting

as anything else?

CFT  No, that didn’t bother me until 1987, in Amsterdam when I did my last art action – although I’ve done some others since. The audience was clearly waiting for me to strip off and that was the first time I thought, I’m not going to do it. That was working against my transgressive reputation. I thought, fuck you, I’m not going to do what you expect me to do. The whole action became an exorcism of that expectation, of that past.

PC  Your relationship with Gen, the violence and manipulation you were subjected to, is a major theme of the book. How aware do you think Gen was

of acting that way and how aware were you?

CFT  The manipulation was well-disguised, but I wasn’t unaware of it. I worked within it to make sure I could still carry on and be me. I succeeded. Women are well-equipped for working against manipulation. That’s what everyone should have a better understanding of, especially my generation

of women. We’ve had to work around sexism and misogyny and that makes us strong.

PC  Do you ever feel like you’re done with exploring the personal in your work?

CFT  No, because it’s metamorphic. I don’t see the point in rehashing past performances, but referencing and reworking is what I’ve always done.

You also see things differently in retrospect. Looking at my pornographic modelling I think, yes, that was my action, but it’s much more interesting within the context of a whole magazine. That’s why I frame entire photo spreads, because you get to glimpse the whole world that I inhabited to make them. You see the other girls, the ads, the articles written to get guys excited and ready for the photographs. It reveals what I went through.

PC  You’re much more ambivalent about the strip-tease work. Was it aesthetically jarring to find yourself dancing to pop songs?

CFT  As with the magazine work, I researched it. The Arabian Arms pub in Bethnal Green, London,  used to have topless dancers and I’d go and watch them. I had to fit the purpose, so I couldn’t just dance to TG, because I wouldn’t have made any money for myself or the agency I worked for. When the two worlds crossed over, that was weird. In a pub off Oxford Street a guy came up and said, ‘you’re from Throbbing Gristle. Will you sign this?’ I was dancing there as Scarlet, my stripper name. I wasn’t Cosey. I’d been naked in the art performances, so what’s the difference? But I didn’t like that

at all because they were looking at me like a naked TG member.

There are damaging aspects of the sex industry but I don’t think destructiveness is inherent in making porn.

PC  In writing about the risk of exploitation or the threat of violence when stripping – were you worried about reinforcing a view of pornography

as inherently damaging and anti-feminist?

CFT  It was better for me not to think about that if I was going to give an honest account. I’m not going to lie to keep some feminist theory on track.

The feminist struggle involves all these things: why do some women feel that they’re free to explore their sexuality, display themselves in public and make pornography? They’re answering different urges within themselves that other women don’t feel, and neither position is right or wrong. Aspects

of the sex industry are totally wrong, when it’s not consensual, but for a woman to be free to do what she wants with her body, doesn’t necessarily feed into the objectification of women. It depends on who you are and what you want to do with those images.

Feminism has to allow freedom of expression. As long as it doesn’t cause harm or degrade people, which they say, pornography does, but again

it depends on what you want to do. If you’re highly sexed, and you enjoy using pornography, loads of women are doing their own porn now.

There are damaging aspects of the sex industry but I don’t think destructiveness is inherent in making porn.

‘COUM Transmissions’, 2017, installation view, Humber Street Gallery, Hull, vitrine 19:
 original black PVC strap costume worn at the Melkweg. Courtesy: Cosey Fanni Tutti and Cabinet, London; photograph: Mark Blower

PC  In the late-’70s, during TG’s most active years, punk was also around, but you’re pretty ambivalent about it in the book.

CFT  It was rock and roll in its basic form, and they were boy bands selling clothes for the two shops, Seditionaries/Sex and Boy, on London’s Kings Road. I’m cynical because I saw how those bands were manufactured. Punk was American first and foremost, and that probably had more currency than UK punk. I couldn’t afford the bondage trousers in Seditionaries or Boy, so how punk is that?

PC  You write about David Medalla’s influence on COUM, even though you were unaware of it at the time. How did you find your influences if you didn’t go to art school?

CFT  I was with art students and musicians before I even met Gen, so my life in Hull was already on the fringe and I was seeking pleasures of all kinds: drugs, music, art, everything. By the time I met Gen, and the other members of COUM we were all primed with information. I brought in the real life, I think.I had no idea that so much of what COUM was based on Medalla’s art commune Transmedia Explorations. It was a huge shock to find that out later and it stopped me writing my book for about two weeks.

PC  Did you feel it undermined what you’d done with COUM?

CFT  Momentarily, until I spoke to quite a few people and they said it had nothing to do with my work.

‘COUM Transmissions
’, 2017, installation view, Humber Street Gallery, Hull, photographs from Sex Une Bonne Idée, Nuf eld Gallery, 1975. Courtesy: Cosey Fanni Tutti and Cabinet, London

PC  The sound of Chris and Cosey is so different to what you’d done before.

CFT  After TG ended Chris and me had a whole new life ahead of us, and our son. We were free to do anything we wanted. We got involved with electronica and writing songs. ‘October Love Song’ is gloriously celebratory and a lot of the songs are about embracing the incredible feelings of being with another human being.

It was fresh, it was joyful and with a female voice. I think people miss that point: TG was very male dominated and was aggressive. It was a male voice literally screaming at you. Chris and Cosey is all about the human condition, including its dark aspects, but in a form that you can dance to. It’s much subtler than TG.

PC  Do you think you’d learnt the value of subtlety in leaving TG?

CFT  Yes. There were times when I thought that the sound was so intense in its own right that we didn’t need such basic, blatant lyrics.

Cosey Fanni Tutti is an artist and musician based in the UK. In February she curated the exhibition ‘COUM Transmissions’

at Humber Street Gallery, Hull, UK (3 February - 22 March 2017), and her autobiography Art, Sex, Music, was published

by Faber this month. She will have a show at Cabinet, London later in the year.